In article ,
Tim McDaniel wrote:
The way to protect against micrometeorites (and in LEO, space debris)
is with multiple thin "bumper" shields spaced well out...

I take it that that doesn't work for cosmic rays -- enough shielding
far out to break up the cosmic ray particles, and distance from the
bumper shields to let time take care of the cosmic ray fragments?
That could only work if the fragments were almost all slow or almost
all very quick to decay.

Alas, cosmic rays are very energetic, and so many of the secondaries are
moving very fast and go a long way before decaying. The showers of
secondaries from cosmic rays being stopped in the upper atmosphere are
easily detected on the ground; in fact, the muon and the pion were both
first discovered as cosmic-ray secondaries. Also, some of the eventual
decay products would themselves remain dangerous, e.g. fragments of nuclei
might decay a little but wouldn't disappear.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |